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An exhibition of original art by Procartoonists.org member David Ziggy Greene, drawn for the reportage strip Scene & Heard, which has appeared in Private Eye since 2011, is at the Orbital Comics Gallery, 8 Great Newport Street, London, from 12 September until 10 October.

Entitled Scene & Hung, the exhibition ties in with the release of a book collection of Scene & Heard strips, described by Charlie Brooker as “as addictive as shelling and eating pistachio nuts”.

An exhibition of cartoons, drawings and paintings by John Longstaff, better known as Cluff, is at the Crown Street Art Gallery in Darlington from 20 September until 13 November. Cluff has been the Northern Echo cartoonist since 1990 and is also seen regularly in magazines such as Private Eye.

In the wake of recent disappointing decisions elsewhere in the mainstream press, it’s encouraging to see cartoons being celebrated this week in a major newspaper. The Independent is the latest to provide coverage of Private Eye’s new retrospective cartoon book, and PCO members feature prominently in the article, which includes quotes from Nick Newman and is accompanied by classic gags from Ken Pyne and Mike Williams (above), among others. Read the article here.

The future of The Dandy as a weekly printed comic appears to be in jeopardy. Its publisher says that no decision has been made, but Procartoonists.org understands that the comic is likely to be coming to an end in September.

In the modern fashion there has been a lot of reaction online, notably with the #SaveTheDandy campaign. Of course, the single best way to do this is by buying the product but, as this excellent piece of work at Down the Tubes (derived from the Audited Bureau of Circulation figures) shows, the decline of print comic sales is a widespread and longstanding phenomenon.

Almost as long as Doctor Who has been on — and off — our TV screens he has also been seen in his comics incarnation.

The world’s longest running sci-fi series began in late 1963 and the Doctor first appeared in cartoon form in TV Comic in the following year.

A new exhibition, Doctor Who in Comics: 1964-2011 brings together artwork featuring all eleven Doctors from publications including TV Comic, TV Century 21 and Doctor Who Magazine. Comic-strips were famously one of the mediums that kept the Doctor alive for the fans when the TV show was off the air for 16 years — yes, excepting Paul McGann’s one-off TV film, don’t write in! — between 1989 and 2005.

The show, which materialises at the Cartoon Museum in London on Wednesday, features work by many writers and artists including Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Dicky Howett, Roger Langridge, David Lloyd, Pat Mills, Alan Moore and John Wagner. It looks set to be a family hit for all generations over the summer. Catch it before it dematerialises on October 30.

Cartoons and comics strips can often be seen in some surprising places, but probably none more so than this boating shelter in Battersea Park, London.

The comic artists Sean Azzopardi, Joe Decie, John Cei Douglas, Ellen Lindner, Douglas Noble and Paul O’Connell drew eight different short comic strips about a fictional 1974 rock concert in the park. These have been enlarged and pasted on to the shelter and can be read in any order.

Cartoons outside the printed page do have to compete with some “real world” factors though. And in this case it’s not graffiti, as you might expect, but a staggeringly large colony of spiders!

The boating shelter strips accompany the Hypercomics exhibition which is at the nearby Pump House Gallery.

The show features four rooms by four artists, Adam Dant, Warren Pleece, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, and Dave McKean, above.

It’s very much an experimental exhibition, with comic strip narratives spiralling off in all kinds of directions and intersecting with the building itself.

Like any experiment it’s not wholly successful, some of the strips are far to wordy to be exhibited on walls. But McKean’s room worked brilliantly and was the stand-out for me, telling a compelling story with beautifully drawn comic frames alongside sculptures, photography and masks.

An exhibition entitled Alex in Love opens today at the Last Tuesday Society in East London, and runs until June 18.

Via a selection of comic strips from The Independent and The Daily Telegraph, from 1987 to the present day, Alex will divulge some of the wisdom and expertise he has acquired on the art of love. The infamous City boy character, created by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor, has been married for 20 years, we are told, though that does include four affairs and a career’s worth of strip-club expenses claims.

The Last Tuesday Society, at 11 Mare Street, Hackney – a gallery which boasts a quirky shop selling a range of exotic objects from two-headed teddy bears to mummified penises – is open Wed-Sun, 12-7pm. The nearest Tube station is Bethnal Green.

Cartoonist Stephan Pastis has used his newspaper comic strip Pearls Before Swine to take a very funny swipe at cartoonists who peddle what he sees as hackneyed and dated gags about subjects such as golf, henpecked husbands and “hot secretaries”. Bloghorn says, feel free to voice your objections to either side of the argument in comments, below.

There are cartoon fossickers who dig and delve among old comics – I’m talking American comics, circa late 1930s and early 1940s, looking for, and still finding, strange treasures and curios. Like, for example, Stardust, Fantomah, Buzz Crandall of the Space Patrol and, finally, Big Red McLane of the Northwoods. The link between them is the late Fletcher Hanks, cartoonist, strip artist and, according to R. Crumb, “a twisted dude”. He should know.The comic Stardust features in the Collected works of Fletcher Hanks reviewed here by PCOer John Jensen.

Gary Panter, an American illustrator and a former denizen of the psychedelic era but now a hugely successful graphics person wrote the following for the jacket blurb of the collection I am about to review for you.

“Fletcher Hanks was this old guy back in the old days who made magic jellybeans. The magic jellybeans looked like comics, but they were magic jellybeans.”

If you ever see the strips you’ll know that a hammer has smacked a nail firmly on its head. Stardust is the biggest jellybean of them all. One more quotation, this from one of the strips, written just prior to Germany starting off on World War Two:

“Stardust [he lives on his own asteroid] whose vast knowledge of interplanetary science has made him the most remarkable man that ever lived, devotes his abilities to crime-busting …”

In one story, our super-sized, booming voiced hero uses a boomerang ray; a fusing ray, his reducing ray and, finally, his transporting ray. In other strips he makes himself invisible, travels faster than the speed of light and has an active anti-gravity ray, a magnetic ray, a suspending ray and a disintegrating ray – the ray doesn’t disintegrate but other things do!

His mental power stops thugs from shooting at him while, also under his belt – you should see his belt! – there is an attractor beam and an agitator ray. The villains, always grotesque and quite mad, are invariably captured after which they meet their hideous eternal variegated dooms. No doubt Stardust celebrates victory with his very own Hip Hip Hoo Ray.

Fantomah, the Mystery Woman of the Jungle, had many edgy, disconcerting powers of her own, including the ability when cross, of turning her face into a skull. Very useful in a supermarket queue I would guess.

Another curious point about the anthology is that the Afterword is a strip written and drawn by Paul Karasik, who met and was slightly shocked by the artist’s son who apparently hated his Dad. Hanks was allegedly a drunkard, a liar and, to cap it all a deadbeat who froze to death on a park bench. He also painted ducks in a pond.

The Comics of Fletcher Hanks “I SHALL DESTROY ALL CIVILIZED PLANETS!” was recently published by Fantagraphic Books. If you’re a Knockout or Beano fan you might not care for, or about, this extraordinary gathering of super surreals but if, like me, you grew up with American comics you’ll be full of beans. Jellybeans.

I should admit that he is not my favourite comedian, and I am not a particular fan of comic strips, as opposed to stand-alone cartoon jokes.

Much of what Jupitus had to say in his Radio 4 show seemed like a repeat of what most cartoonists talk about when they get together: lack of markets and indifferent editors.

The interviewees in the show were able to speak from strength – Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury), Steve Bell (If), Peattie and Taylor (Alex). But I always think that artists like this have become part of the establishment they lampoon. Is it just as easy to get stuck into royalty, celebs and the City of London when you are selling strips in umpteen countries around the world and your stuff is syndicated all over the place?

I do think Steve Bell has kept his integrity, but I wonder how much attention people pay to “cartoonists with attitude”? We, as a nation, do seem happy to accept bland publishable stuff as the norm.

I did like some of the comments by the cartoonists interviewed by Jupitus, such as Steve Bell’s call for a “missionary zeal” in making cartoons which have something to say. In contrast, I was not so keen to hear that the future of cartoons will be online.

Overall, I found the programme bland, smug and much of it decidedly familiar. A real time-filler. It was lazy broadcasting and lazy journalism.

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Disclaimer: Any opinion expressed here is that of the named individual and not that of the UK Professional Cartoonists' Organisation unless explicitly stated. Artwork attributed to a named author or publication on this diary should be noted by anyone linking to us from any other site. Thank you. If you wish to reproduce an image please contact the artist from here.